Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar, 12/12/86

From The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny
Casolaro by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith, Feral House.

Tony Casolaro saw his brother on Monday, and thought that he
looked tired. Danny said that he had been getting threatening
calls in the middle of the night, and that they were ruining his
sleep. Danny stated that the calls had been going on for about
three months.

A close friend, Ben Mason, showed up at Casolaro's house
around 3:30 pm, and although Mason was anxious to go to a
restaurant and eat, Casolaro insisted on showing him some of his
latest investigatory acquisitions. He took Mason downstairs and
retrieved five pages of material from a box. The first page was
information on contra arms transfers, allegedly involving Adnan
Khashoggi. Two more pages were photocopies of BCCI checks for one
million and four million dollars, drawn on Adnan Khashoggi and
Manucher Ghorbanifar accounts -- these checks had been known to
researchers since 1987 or earlier. Another page was a passport
photo of Hassan Ali Ibrahim Ali, said to be the manager of
Sitico, allegedly a front for Iraqi arms deals. From the way
Casolaro spoke to Mason, it seemed that he had met Ibrahim. Doug
Vaughan's research determined that the pages had come from Bob
Bickel, who had gotten them from Richard Brenneke, another figure
prominent in Casolaro's research, someone who had provided
testimony about the October Surprise.

...

On August 5, Casolaro had called Texas oil engineer Bob Bickel,
who at one time worked as a Customs Bureau informant, apparently
to talk about Robert Booth Nichols and his association with a
former Justice official named Michael Abbell and Columbian drug
lord Gilberto Rodriquez, both of whom were being investigated for
their connections to the Cali drug cartel. Bickel previously had
aspired to blow the whistle on CIA chief Robert Gates' role in
shipping weapons to Iraq in the late 1980s. He had given Danny
photocopies of one million and four million dollar checks drawn
on the BCCI accounts of Iran-contra go-betweens Adnan Khashoggi
and Manucher Ghorbanifar. He also gave him the passport
photograph of Hassan Ali Ibrahim Ali, a front man for Iraqi
weapons sales. (Doug Vaughan traced these papers back to Richard
Brenneke.) The check photocopies had circulated among researchers
for years but when matched with the passport it seemed to
represent a great breakthrough to Danny. Was Hassan Ali Ibrahim
Ali the "maybe Arab or Iranian" man that a waitress saw Casolaro
with at the Sheridan that night?